Anne's Odds and Ends: Rainbow Theme Birthday Party

My youngest had a Rainbow themed Birthday Party this year. To see her Rainbow pre-school aged party games check out my entry here. Today I'm going to show you the rest of our Rainbow Party details.

Decorations/Favors:

A rainbow theme is easy to decorate, you just need rainbow colors! I bought our supplies at the Dollar Store, Target, Etsy and the Lego Store.

The party favors doubled as decorations. I bought each child a helium balloon (dollar store) in as close to a rainbow as possible including clouds on each side. :) I had rainbow colored (reusable) straw cups from Target with their names pre-written on them. They used them during the party and took them home afterwords.

The reusable cups come with their own (short) straws which I included in the goodie bags to take home. However, for party purposes I purchased rainbow colored paper straws from an Etsy shop to use instead. They were cuter and who doesn't love a paper straw? I cut out little cloud shapes to put through the straws, using a paper hole punch to make a place to push the straw through.

The goodie bags were white bags from Target. A 10 pack was only $5. I wrote each child's name on the front and had my girls decorate the bags with rainbow stickers (from the $ store).

Make a Lego Rainbow:

Our favorite but most time consuming party favor was the Make a Lego Rainbow. I decided a little Lego activity would be fun to send home as the pre-K crowd is getting more interested in Lego, both boys and girls! I found an image of a little Lego rainbow online and went to the Lego store to purchase bulk Lego in the correct colors. This was a fun activity with the kids, searching out the correct colors and numbers of blocks.

The Lego store sells bulk Lego in two sizes, we weren't able to get them all in the small container so we paid $16.99 to fill the large one. There was space in the container after purchasing blocks for 10 kids, so I let my girls add whatever they wanted to fill up the cup for us to keep. My birthday-girl picked out dozens of little "eyes" and stuck them on blocks, hilarious!

This is the Lego Rainbow that we created.

If I had planned farther ahead I could have reprinted the photo of the rainbow to put into each goodie bag as a direction, but I waited until the night before (Ha!) so I hand drew little rainbows on 3x5 cards and colored them in with some help from my oldest daughter. We included the "instruction" card in a plastic baggie with the loose Lego pieces, that way each child could make the rainbow themselves. Super fun!

Other Rainbow Favors:

To fill out the goodie bag I added a rainbow art supplies according to the age of the child (paints, markers, crayons or pencils). Also a small bag of skittles.

Other Decorations and Food:

The party was in the morning so I kept the food simple. We had Annie brand rainbow crackers and cookies, rainbow fruit cups, cake and ice-cream and a coffee bar for the grown-ups. My daughter was very specific on what she wanted for a cake: white, white, white and a little rainbow. I ordered our cake from Albertsons and added some bright candles. Now...I could have make a vanilla cake myself but I wasn't up for the challenge this year. I did make 3 different kinds of organic-chemical free ice cream though, that has to count for something. ;)

Decorations were simple, a Birthday Banner, birthday table cloth ($ store), napkins, horns and plates (Target) and of course a rainbow bouquet of flowers with a Happy Birthday Balloon inside (balloon $ store). I used my vintage Pyrex rainbow bowls to hold food and prizes.

The rainbow fruit bowls were simple to make and perfect for a morning party. I selected blueberries, green grapes, pineapple chunks and strawberries.

This photo doesn't do them justice but trust me, they were delicious! Double-Chocolate, Vanilla (Haagen Daz copy recipe) and Buttermilk. It took me 3 nights to make them plus a dozen eggs, 3 pints of heavy cream and lots of sugar but they were worth it!